Playing Giant Jenga With Shipping Containers

Hong Kong-based OVA Studio has designed a unique hotel concept that can grow and shrink in size dependent on the demand for the rooms. The result is The Hive Inn, a hotel made out of shipping containers stacked in a modular fashion, much like the game Jenga, but on a giant scale.

The structure, designed for the Radical Innovation Award, uses recycled shipping containers as hotel rooms that can be easily moved around, added and retracted and moved to different locations. In addition to this, this project provides a great marketing opportunity for brands such as Ferrari, who can lease the container over a period of time, who then in turn, can design both the outside and inside of the container.

Guests then get the opportunity to select the room they wish to stay in, perhaps based on the brand, whilst the overall costs of the hotel are reduced due to the advertising income.

Although the concept of the hotel was based with hospitality in mind, it raises the question as to what else the design could be adapted towards, for example, emergency housing, mobile offices and pop up retail. The opportunities seem endless; whilst at the same time it is an exciting and imaginative design and concept.

Florida-based office Oppenheim Architecture + Design has released the artist impressions of its proposals for 47 desert lodges at a resort in Wadi Rum, Jordan. The resort has a completely different atmosphere compared to the resorts we know from the Mediterranean and Caribbean coasts: no rude interventions such as skyscraping hotels and obscene tourist strips will…

Swedish architecture firm Tengbom have designed an innovative, sustainable and extremely compact solution for student housing. Next year, 22 wooden pop-up modules will be built at Lund’s university campus in Sweden. The small houses can easily be moved around, which makes the concept flexible and easy to implement on a temporary basis. It gives universities the option to quickly adapt their student housing to number of registered students.

These aren’t your typical childhood tree houses. German tree house maker Baumraum has crafted luxurious cocoons for the Mendoza resort Entre Cielos. The futuristic pods are designed to be surrounded by nature, located amidst the foliage of actual vineyards, yet elevated beyond the worries of everyday life.

Worldwide governments have to economize, which generally means there will be less money to spend on the city’s public spaces. Here on The Pop-Up City we are very much interested in new financing strategies concerning public space. Would it, for instance, be possible to give world-leading brands the opportunity to invest in public spaces while giving them some brand visibility in return? Usually only talking about such an idea leads to angry faces and automatic defending mechanisms. Generally, brand involvement is considered something bad in the urban planning community. It seems to be completely normal that local governments sell all empty walls for advertisement space in order to earn some extra money, while at the same time it is not done to ask brands to get involved in public space design… even when the community could get something worth-full in return.